Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Syncing..., Part 2

Plaxo is cool, but it just doesn't do what I need. It doesn't put appointments into my iPhone stand-alone Calendar application. ...Which means that when I'm in Europe and don't want to pay roaming charges for data, I'm not going to get an alert on my iPhone when a Google Calendar-entered appointment comes due.

GooSync looks interesting (e.g., "Sync multiple Google calendars"), but I'd have to pay for the Premium Account option to see if it would work. With so many things I've tried not working, and with plenty of other things occupying my time, my internal barrier to entry is too high to try this one.

It looks like Synthesis AG has interesting plans for an iPhone SyncML client, but it looks like that would give me less of a "solution" per se, and more of a basis for a new programming project that I could do myself with the GData APIs that Tony mentioned. I'm not interested in doing this myself as a project.

Dominic sent me an interesting article that does really get to the point of what I want, but it requires jail-breaking (i.e., voiding the warranty) on my iPhone. It didn't take me much introspection to figure out my position on this: I'm not a jail-breaking kind of guy.

The best solution appears to be to wait a few weeks and see what happens as a result of the scheduled-for-June release of iPhone G3 or whatever they'll call it, which is supposed to also take advantage of some mass of developers out there writing new apps for the new iPhone SDK. So, I'll wait and see what happens here in the next few weeks.